Are dreams harmful to our well-being?
When I was a kid, my parents, teachers, or kids tv shows gassed me up telling me that when I grow up I'll be able to do whatever I want, and happiness is achievable. That I'd grow up to be someone important.
And now that I've grown, I'm slowly realizing how indifferent the world surrounding me is, but I can't help but have hopes of a future where I get the job I like and life gets better. It is the same loop from my childhood.
Is it false to have dreams? Do they always end up disappointing us? Should we meet life head on or hope that it gets better one day? Are dreams harmful to our well being?
And now that I've grown, I'm slowly realizing how indifferent the world surrounding me is, but I can't help but have hopes of a future where I get the job I like and life gets better. It is the same loop from my childhood.
Is it false to have dreams? Do they always end up disappointing us? Should we meet life head on or hope that it gets better one day? Are dreams harmful to our well being?
Comments (20)
Dreams aren't what's harmful, expectations are harmful. Expectations can ruin people. Balancing your expectations isn't easy, you don't want to expect mediocrity from yourself but if your expectations aren't met, how will you respond? Is it so bad to have a cushioned fall when you fail to meet your expectations? Does it need to be so bad that mirrors haunt you as you grow old because you don't like what you see, viewing your life as missed opportunities and repeated failures to meet your expectations?
Dreams also re-callibrate and re-fresh your mind, as well as provide small or big natural entertainment; they're quite the opposite; not harmful but healing.
When life gets hard, as it usually tends to do, we dream of a better situation, and I think that we naturally dream in hard conditions as a way to reduce the stress or pain, a coping mechanism.
And I doubt that anyone accepts their problems fully and doesn't expect things to get better, no matter how much philosophy they've read or how they know that life is never perfect. I think all of us do.
Looking at things from this perspective, I think that dreams and expectations are the same. And if we don't expect things to get better, then life gets fucking scary
I didn't state you shouldn't. I don't think I stated anything of a prescriptive nature in my previous post.
Our gloomy existence? My existence isn't all that gloomy.
You're more likely to change your situation by acting as opposed to dreaming. Just sayin'...
Well, I won't say you're wrong, it may be the case that expectations and dreams are the same thing for you.
I might dream of being extremely rich but my expectations aren't so high, if I don't become extremely rich then that's okay and what I expected but if I don't meet my expectations of having a certain amount of wealth that might be a problem for my ego. That's my view.
It depends on your interpretation and more specifically the intricacies around how you deal with holding yourself to your expectations.
I wouldn't say wanting things that might fail is dangerous but an inability to handle failure, error or defeat can cause a lot of stress and frustration. People who are appalled with themselves for not being able to do something they consider "basic" and just wind themselves up for no reason.
Another case is when people become psychologically desperate because their self-worth is dependent upon attaining or retention of what they want. They experience contempt for what they are because they have expectations for themselves that are better than that.
There's also shame, embarrassment, insecurity, self-loathing, anxiety and so on when you are perceiving yourself negatively because you have this mindset where you meet your expectations is EXPECTED, there's nothing to be proud of here. When you fail to meet your expectations, that's something to be ashamed about, it's a character deficiency.
There are many alternative mindsets to this which give good results and make having goals and dreams not harmful at all. Expectations can be insidious killers.
Sola dosis facit venenum
Perhaps you are doing something wrong if you don't interpret dreams correctly; doing so would be more intelligent.
Dreams mirror you, even if they're bad, it's to suggest you're doing something wrong; they are made of energy and matter, and the types of energy and matter are consciousness-like, on a plane that's higher than life, to us the mind, but also energy extracted at it's most pure level; it's universe-creation-ability.
I want to adapt my mind to see things that are pleasurable; that's one account where dreams are proficent.
Dreams mirror us, perhaps they're linked to an fatherly energy of a species that can communicate through that if they wanted; and getting bad dreams is a sign of unworthiness or evil egoism.
So what you're saying is that there are shitty things as well as good things in the world and I'm trying to work on my mind so that it wouldn't be fixated on negative stuff. You've chosen to try to look at life from a positive perspective. is that right?
But the thing that haunts me the most is that what if negative things are inevitable and running away from them can hurt you severely.
I think happiness is a byproduct of a healthy ego, healthy interpretations, a positive outlook for the future and some other things.
Interpretative problems need to be resolved interpretatively, there's a whole world of possibilities interpretatively speaking but that's a bit of a divergence from the topic of this thread. The point is that if that for most things, we don't know how it interacts with you until we hear about how you interpret it and what you think it causes.
Are dreams a curse or a boon? For me, there are only two factors: interpretation and causation. Since causation is heavily tied to interpretation, that's usually an option to making something bad good rather than getting rid of it. If what dreams do is show you this fantastic you and the great life that never seems to materialise and that causes you to resent or despair but dreams can be a boon for other people then all that's left is causation and interpretation.
We can infer from this that there's a way of interpreting the existence of your dreams in a way which isn't detrimental. I suggested a possibility but if you are personally feeling that your dreams hurt your well-being then you already know what the problem is for you.
I also want to add that biological differences and the relationships with other interpretations can mean that dreams are not beneficial for you and nothing you do will change this. That's why despite what I said, one can forsake dreams to remove the problems they cause. Just understand that dreams are reinforced as habitually recurring interpretations and you probably can't get rid of them without fixing those.
If you continually use ways of thinking predicated on the concept that the possibility of your dreams materialising still exists then while consciously rejecting the idea of having dreams, that won't work. So you need to be wary of such habits and aim to replace them with ones that make sense with your new views about dreams.
Do me a favour and define healthy mindset.
Quoting Judaka
I also think that human beings have a wild imagination, and can't help themselves dreaming the impossible. Girls at early ages dream of that prince charming on the white horse and boys dream of the future with 5 yachts and 10 houses. I think that dreaming is in man's instinct and is impossible to stop.
What do you dream about?
Healthy mindset? I think that depends on the context.
I would like to be wealthy, with a wife I'm in love with and great kids, working for myself and with many hobbies that I enjoy.
When I was younger (I'm 26 now) I thought about the kind of character I wanted to have and the kind of outlook I wanted. A dream is kind of a sad term because a dream becomes an ambition when you have a plan. So a dream is not something that is likely to occur, that's how one way you can destroy dreams - by having a realistic plan.
I do fantasise about maybe one day writing a book about something and some of my ideas being useful to others. Or about being rich or becoming one of the best at something and experiencing great victories. If such things happen then yay but I don't need them to happen for me to live happily-ever-after.
If I thought these desires were unhealthy then I would strip them of their value interpretatively as I previously described. Perhaps to some extent, I've done that enough to the point where I can accept them not happening. I don't really care if my ideas are useful to others, I don't need to be rich or be the best and if I did feel that these things had to happen for w/e reason then I imagine that could be a burden on me.